“... But like several clever men who went out to India – Virginia Woolf’s uncle James Fitzjames Stephen, for example – his intelligence only intensified his reactionary instincts. Brought up in the lawless backwoods of Co. Tipperary, O’Dwyer believed in Order first and last (and not much Law to go with it). He regarded any reforms designed to give ...”

“... effect, only two theories of evolution have ever been put forward,’ writes John Maynard Smith, ‘one, originating with Lamarck ... the other originating with Darwin.’ Such reduction of the scientific corpus to patterns of mutual exclusivity doubtless tells us something about the strategy, if not the logic, of scientific corroboration. It is a ...”

“... Maschler’s achievements as a general trade publisher rank him with Archibald Constable, George Smith, John Blackwood, George Routledge, Frederick Macmillan, David Garnett, Ian Parsons, Allen Lane. It was one of the most highly regarded of today’s younger publishers, Peter Straus (now an agent), who commissioned the book. None of these coat-brushers of ...”

“... since it’s an authorship made up of two people, the challenge is to discover how, like Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, Don Gately and Hal Incandenza, they might ever be brought together at all.) In 2000, DeWitt published a first novel called The Last Samurai; it sold a hundred thousand copies in English, was translated into ten languages and turns up on various ...”

“... your beautiful saintly soul.’ Eliot was a creature of habit: in the mornings, communion at St Stephen’s; in the afternoons, business at Faber, dictating innumerable letters; writing in the evenings; rosaries in the early hours. Letters to Emily, typed from his desk, were a vital part of his amatory and auditory imagination – part of the rhythm of his ...”

“... No two pictures​ of her look at all alike,’ Stephen Schiff wrote of Muriel Spark in 1993. ‘In one she may seem a sturdy English rose, in another a seductress staring down at her prey, in still another an intellectual prankster peeking wryly over her spectacles, and sometimes she looks merely square and oatmeal-faced, grinning wholesomely into too much flashbulb ...”

“... Norman Mailer, whose book was being launched. At other parties I saw Angus Wilson, Kingsley Amis, Stephen Spender and others, writers whose work I knew but whose faces (like those of most other writers) did not resemble the photographs on their book jackets. I praised their work, I tried to make an impression, but my talk was seldom literary. I solicited ...”

“... political and social upheavals of a wholly unparalleled kind. It is on this theme that Stephen Blakemore focuses his attention. Burke and the Fall of Language concentrates on the writer who was more aware than anyone – other than his mortal enemy Rousseau – of the extent to which politics is not just described but actually constituted by the ...”

“... no other kind of feat. At its best, Bardic Romance rose to the sort of picturesque realism that Stephen Dedalus pastiched in ‘Scylla and Charybdis’: The flag is up on the playhouse by the bankside. The bear Sackerson growls in the pit near it, Paris garden. Canvasclimbers who sailed with Drake chew their sausages among the groundlings ... At its ...”

“... life can be summarised, albeit crudely, as follows: he was born in 1914, the son of John Allyn Smith, who died in 1926, apparently by suicide; his mother then married the family lodger, a man called Berryman; the young boy was sent to a boarding-school, a sport-fixated establishment at which he was never happy, and completed his American education at ...”

“... say, Groundhog Day) than because the situation has been resolved on its own terms. Despite​ Stephen Dedalus’s assertion in Ulysses that ‘amor matris, subjective and objective genitive, may be the only true thing in life,’ motherhood isn’t a particularly common central subject for treatment in fiction. Nevertheless Phillips is working within a ...”

“... restrictions, left-of-centre figures such as Cook, John Prescott, Margaret Beckett and Chris Smith have been allowed to surround themselves with like-minded ministers. The man who has replaced the Blairite factotum Stephen Byers, for example, in charge of minimum wage and trade-union rights, is Ian McCartney – a ...”

“... in a metaphor of pharmacological magic, of revitalising the self through its energy. Hélène Smith, a young Genevan medium who starred in Dr Théodore Flournoy’s bestseller From India to the Planet Mars (1899),4 spoke in many tongues, including Martian. Her multiple selves included Marie Antoinette, a 15th-century Hindu princess called Simandini, and a ...”

“... on Newton’s use of graphical methods, while a jet engineer and philosopher of science, George Smith, gives us his views on Newton’s theories of the Moon’s motion and the mutual attraction of Jupiter and Saturn, and evaluates the Principia’s treatment of motion through resisting media. The highest technical expertise is no guarantee of competent ...”

“... could then be reduced on such valuable activities as saving, for example. In the tradition of Adam Smith, this proposal relies more on national self-interest than on virtue, and would need relatively little international co-operation to function. But more often Stiglitz’s reforms ask for permanent international bureaucracies to be set up: a judicial body to ...”